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How A Teenager's App Beat Angry Birds. For Five Hours.

Millennial Thursday: Marketed as “an app for procrastinators,” Finish has been a success by many standards. Launched in January 2013, it boasts over 200,000 downloads, won the AppleApple Design Award for 2013 and, perhaps most excitingly, beat the uber-popular app Angry Birds in the charts.

“I still tell everyone we beat Angry Birds, even if it was for five hours,” says Ryan Orbuch, the Lead Designer of Finish who co-founded the app with classmate Michael Hansen when he was 16 years old.

When mentioning interviews with media companies like Tech Crunch and the New York Times, the teenager might seem older than his years. However, with speech that is littered with hyperboles, it would be hard to call the recent high school graduate pretentious.

A digital to-do list, Finish users input tasks under three different categories: short-term, mid-term and long-term. The sleek app has push notifications alerting you when you need to finish tasks. Using Kiip, a moment-based rewards platform, the app gives users coupons or freebies for completing tasks while monetizing Finish for its co-founders.

Finish Lead Designer, Ryan Orbuch. Photo credit: Ryan Orbuch.

With a slogan like, “We’re super pumped to provide even more motivation to stop procrastinating,” it is easy to see the app’s appeal for teenagers.

“Everyone is surprised when some young kid builds something for high schoolers and it works. But we have such a huge advantage in that,” says Orbuch. “It is our demographic.”

“We knew we had to be free upfront. We learned that by being paid for awhile,” says Orbuch.“As much as we would like to pretend it isn’t true, high school kids just won’t pay for apps.”

What might take a few months of demographic market research by a firm, Orbuch knows innately. And while part of it might be the fact because he was a high school student a mere 4 months ago, after speaking with him about the dirth of women in tech, which start-ups are really innovating and if this is the end of Facebook, one thing is clear. Orbuch knows his stuff.

“The most interesting thing about Snapchat to me, besides that it is a product that high schoolers use, is that Facebook has tried to clone them a bunch of times and it didn’t work,” says Orbuch. “Most startups, if Facebook cloned them, would be screwed.”

One reason that Orbuch thinks Snapchat has an edge over Facebook is the company’s “cool factor.”

“When you are the size that Facebook is, you can’t exist at that size without feeling very formal or professional. That design tendency rubs off on the emotions of people using your product,” explains Orbuch. “When you are small enough and want a young demographic like Snapchat does, you don’t have to feel so professional. You can have really ugly stuff in the app to further that mentality and get away with it.”

As for his own app, Orbuch came up with the idea while studying for finals. He passed the idea along to friend and Finish Lead Developer, Michael Hansen, who thought it could be useful as well.

“My proxy for evaluating a new idea is let it sit for a month and by then you will have usually found some reason it is dumb. Finish hung around for a couple of months and it didn’t start to feel stupid,” explains Orbuch. “Every day I am still like, wait it actually sounds like a good idea.”

The 18 year old had always been interested in developing apps and spent time during high school with his co-founder Hansen coming up with ideas for the next best thing. He says, “Michael and I were the kids who were jailbreaking their phones.”

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